Saturday, May 14, 2011

In the previous post about the prehistoric cave art discovered in Basque territory, Spain, the term "lamiak" was used to describe a "half woman-half duck" mythic creature who lived in Askondo cave.

The term rang a bell, but I don't remember exactly where or why I find it so familiar. My mind seems to be associating it with Siberian shamanism and ancient Kalmyk (Kalmak) tales that were carried over to the New World as those ancient peoples moved east across land and sea to the New World. I've got some research buried away - on the computer upstairs! But I'm downstairs now and I'm not going to go digging for it.

I did, however, find some interesting information about lamia or lamiak (plural?).

The first place I ran to was my library to pull out Barbara Walker's indispensible The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Sure enough, I found an entry for Lamia:

Lamia
Greek name for the Libyan serpent-goddess -- Medusa, Neith, Athene, Anatha, or Buto.(1) Lamia was probably a variant of Babylonian Lamashtu, "Mother of Gods" worshipped at Der as a serpent with a woman's head. Though Lamashtu was feared as a Kali-like Destroyer, yet she was also revered as a supreme Goddess, called Daughter of Heaven and Great Lady.(2) Greek myth made her another rival of Hera.

The Latin Vulgate Bible gave "Lamia" as a translation of Hebrew Lilith, Adam's recalcitrant first wife. The Authorized Version rendered lamia as a screech owl. The Revised Version translated the same word as "night monster." During the Middle Ages, lamia became a general term for a witch. A 15th-century German professor of theology stated authoritatively that lamiae were "demons in the shape of old women.(3) See Vagina Dentata.

Geez Louise! Talk about a Night Monster... That ties in to all kinds of legends and myths including the Devouring Mother, Jonah and the Whale (Big Fish), the womb as cave where one gets lost and dies from starvation, not to mention the Incubus (or is it Succubus?). Perhaps one of the most famous renditions of this myth was the action in one of the Star Wars movies where the Millennium Falcon flew into a cave on a planetoid to escape hunting Imperial Fighters. The Falcon lands deep inside the cave and Chewy, Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker get out of the ship and walk around a bit, but after some time there the "cave" they thought they landed in wakes up and it turns out to be a giant serpent-like creature with huge teeth! YES! They had flown right through the mouth into the stomach of the Beast! Tense drama ensues as the Falcon fires up and races toward the entrance - the creature's mouth - that is fast closing with the teeth acting as gigantic bars to escape! Gulp!

You will also notice the mention of the screech owl, a totem animal that is anciently connected to shamanism and later became a symbol for "wisdom," and its connection to Athena, the new and improved (tamer) version of the archaic Greek goddess Athene; however, early renditions of Athena retained her serpent character in the form of her "shield" with serpents' heads or in some versions, made out of serpent skin, and other depictions showed her wearing a cloak with magical protective powers that had serpents' heads as a fringe.

But I don't want to go on about Athena/Athene and her counterparts in other countries -- I want to focus on the word "lamia." So, I did a quick google search and found the following:

The lamia on a coat of arms on a house in Oriegi - in her right hand is the comb, in her
left hand, the "mirror." Or maybe it's a book - the Book of Knowledge of Good and Evil???

According to legend, the Lamia is a mermaid-like creature with either bird-like feet or a fish’s tail who dwells in mountain springs and streams. Here, in the notoriously misty forest glens of the Basque Country, she can be found combing her long blond hair with a golden comb. Whether it is the golden comb or her golden tresses, I am not sure, but she is often attributed with the disappearance of some lonely shepherd of unmeasured ambition who wanders off into the forest in her pursuit and is consequently never seen again.

So you see, the lamiak that is "half duck-half woman" living in a cave from the original article in the prior post is also something of a nymph, although how a mermaid with a fishtail could frollick about in the woods is beyond my ability to visualize... On the other hand, a half woman-half bird creature - and we know many of them from ancient depictions (the original Lilith comes to mind, for instance) - could easily hop through woods and lead an unwary shepherd astray... The lamia in the image, above, would have to stay in water. And yes, this also ties into my ongoing fascination about "visions" of the "Virgin Mary" seen in areas close to or associated with caves and/or rock formations or rocky areas and escarpments and streams or rivers. I've posted about that at least a couple of times. Sacred spaces/sacred places -- often associated with the Goddess -- high places, mountains, rock outcroppings, trees, water.

A "drakaina" is a female dragon, sometimes with human features (female), according to Wikipedia. Okay, does anyone remember the movie "Big Trouble in Little China?" Wasn't there a "dragon lady" in that movie? Or am I confusing my movies and it's actually in "The Golden Child" that the "dragon lady" appeared" - discreetely, behind a veiling curtain so all one could see was the teasing outline of a beautiful woman elaborately coiffed and crowned - and with a dragon's tail - moving about and sometimes making hissing noises, smoking a cigarette in a 1930's style holder?

Python, slain by Apollo, and the earliest representations of Delphyne are shown as simply gigantic serpents, similar to other Greek dragons. However, although the word "drakaina" is literally the feminine form of drakon (Ancient Greek for dragon or serpent), most drakainas had some features of a human woman. Lamia, Campe, Echidna, and many representations of Ceto, Scylla and Delphyne had the head and torso of a woman.

The drakaina was a monster generally slain only by gods or demigods. Zeus slew Delphyne and Campe, Apollo slew Python, and Argus Panoptes slew Echidna.

Ceto and Echidna were both the mothers of a huge brood of monsters, including other dragon-like creatures. Ceto, according to Hesiod, gave birth to Echidna, as well as Scylla and Ladon, the dragon of the Hesperides. Also according to Hesiod, Echidna gave birth to the Chimera, Cerberus, Orthrus, Nemean lion, Sphinx and the Hydra. (Other ancient authors, such as Hyginus, attribute even more monsters as children of Echidna, such as the Caucasian eagle, Crommyonian sow, Colchian dragon and Scylla and Charybdis.)

From the Online Encyclopedia, an abbreviated description that includes a reference to singing, thus perhaps linking to legends about mermaids who lured unwary sailors to their deaths on the rocks by their beautiful singing, with a link-back to Wikipedia:

1. Lamiak
`Lamiak` (sing.: `lamia`), also called `laminak` (sing. `lamin`). In Basque mythology are creatures with bird-like feet that dwell in rivers and springs. They are comparable with Greco-Roman nymphs. Normally female, they are usually portrayed with a golden comb, that often attracts the unmeasured am...
Found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamiak

In Greek mythology, Lamia was the daughter of Poseidon and Lybie, a deity personification of the country of Libya. Lamia is always depicted as being very beautiful, and so she was according to Greek mythology. Zeus fell in love with Lamia, and carried on an affair with her, until his wife, Hera, found out. When Hera discovered the affair, in a jealous rage she stole all of Lamia’s children, except for Scylla, and killed them. Lamia was overcome with horrible grief, and eventually it drove her insane, transforming her into a half snake, half serpent creature that stole and ate children. Zeus, seeking to appease her in some way, granted Lamia the ability to prophecise, as well as remove her own eyes. The gift of being able to remove her eyes was because Lamia could not stop seeing the faces of her dead children.

The story was popular in its sadness and theme, and made its way throughout the world; Lamia went on to have other children, the lowercase lamia, or instead she became lamia, which were a large species of half snake, half feminine monsters. In other parts of the world, mothers used the story of Lamia to frighten their children into obedience. Later on, authors began to attribute other, more lurid details to Lamia, such as a hermaphroditic penis, which came from the sadly perverse mind of Aristophanes. Whores throughout early folklore and fictional literature were sometimes given the name Lamia. In modern Greek folklore or culture, there is still the Lamia, although now she is Lamiae; a slovenly woman, unclean, and lazy, or exceptionally sdtupid, as well as promiscuous. In other modern Greek fairy tales, Lamia is somewhat similar to the Slavic Baba Yaga. She lives in a tower, eats children or the flesh of would-be heroes, and has magical powers. The hero should either kill her, avoid her, or gain her favor so that she can guide him on whatever quest he’s on.

The tower, of course, is today's rook in western-style chess ("castle" in English, "tower" in various languages). In India, the rook created in chess sets for export to the West was an elephant , often with a howdah on its back, perhaps a call-back to the time in India when the rook and bishop traded places on the chessboard. Check out Jean-Louis Cazaux's site for numerous examples of Indian chess sets featuring elephants for the Kings, Ministers (Queen) and rooks.

I am wondering about this image from lamia.net - which did not have a caption or attribution. It looks Persian or maybe Indian to me. Can anyone provide further information on it? I find it very interesting because of the tree image - the Tree of Life? - dead center in the image and the large black serpent underneath the earth nearly centered underneath it. Now if that doesn't evoke the image of the Nordic World Tree I don't know what does! The figures under the earth all have serpent tails - that could easily be described as "fish tails", couldn't they. Interesting, heh? And I think they're all females, although it's a little hard to tell because I can't enlarnge the image, but they all have long hair flowing down their backs. And what is that the serpent is doing? Is it pushing the blue infant through the earth to the surface? Or is it preparing to suck the blue infant down to the underworld? There's obviously some kind of ritual going on above-ground - note the drummer and musicians on the left-hand side of the image. And on the right, the above-ground male figure drawn larger than anything else (other than the serpent), is he a king? I would like to know what actually is going on in this picture!

Note added on Monday, May 16, 2011: The half-human female serpents in the image are NOT lamiak; they are, perhaps, nagini. I found a larger image which makes clear that what I thought was a blue infant is actually Krishna, who dances over the subdued Kaliya Naag in river Yamuna, while his wives are praying to Krishna for his mercy. Also seen on the banks are people of Gokula, Krishna's father Nanda Baba and his brother Balarama. From a Bhagavata Purana manuscript, c. 1640.

Unfortunately, this National Geogrpahic article also gives way too much detail, including a photograph of the entrance to the cave - to alert looters to its exact location. Way to go NG - let the looting begin.

You can just make out the faint red outline of the horse head to the left of
the "3M7" marker. Photo courtesy of Diego Garate and Joseba Rios-Garaizar.

﻿﻿In a locally well known cave near an industrial town in Spain, researchers have unexpectedly discovered faint images of horses and hand prints dating back some 25,000 years.

Concerned that activity at a nearby stone quarry had destroyed much of the cave of Askondo, Diego Garate of the Archaeological Museum of Biscay in Bilbao, and Joseba Rios-Garaizar of the Max Planck Institute set out to determine if any archaeological material was still intact. They entered the cave outside the town of Mañaria and searched for bones, stones, and other artifacts. Only on their way out of the cave did they noticed the paintings that they and many others had missed before. “Without a doubt,” says Garate, “[it was] a gift of destiny.”
﻿

A tracing helps to reveal a horse on the cave wall with a profile something

like a "duck bill," a common feature in European cave art. Photo courtesy

Diego Garate and Joseba Rios-Garaizar.

﻿Speleologists had worked in Askondo in the 1970s, and left their mark in the form of a bright red “3M7″ used to catalogue the cave, but they too missed the art just inches away. “They didn’t see the red horse!” says Garate. “Better for us. We will restore the figure.”

I spoke with Diego Garate over email to get more of the story.

How often do people find new paintings in this part of Spain?

The north of Spain is the first European region where caves with paleolithic art were located [in 1879 at Altamira], and for more than a century the findings have followed one another, every time with less frequency. In fact, in the province of Biscay, only four other decorated cavities have been found since 1904, so every new finding is very important.

Do you have any theories about why horses are shown so often in European cave art?

One thing we know is that the Palaeolithic artists did not strictly paint the same animals that they hunted and ate but, for some reason that we can’t understand, they chose other ones. In the north of Spain at the time the horses of Askondo were painted, hind [red deer] was the most represented animal. There are some caves that escape this tendency, perhaps due to regional artistic differences.

How do these compare to the paintings at Altamira or other caves in the area?

The paintings located in the cave of Askondo could be contemporary to the first stage of decoration of Altamira. In Altamira’s “ceiling of the polychromes,” below the famous bison, [older] red figures of horses are detected, very similar to the ones found in [Askondo]. There are other caves in the north of Spain–La Pasiega, La Haza, El Salitre, etc.–with red painted animals near the entrance of the cave, in zones of semi-darkness where still the sunlight arrives. [This contrasts with many of the more famous images from Europe, which are found in the darkest regions of caves. --A.H.]

Are there any ways in which the cave art of Spain as a whole is different from the cave art of France?

For the first periods of artistic activity, [yes]. The advantage of the cave of Askondo is that it is halfway between both territories. This geo-strategic position is reflected in the iconography, with some rather Pyrenean (French) elements like bones fitted into the walls, and some Cantabrian (Spanish) elements like twin outlines, and with others more general elements that appear on a large scale throughout Western Europe like the horses with “duck bills” or the hand stamps.

Do people living in the area now have any special beliefs about the caves?

There is a very ancient mythology in Basque culture related to caves. In fact, there is an old legend for Askondo cave which says that a young boy from the farmhouse near the cave passed close to the cave every day to go to spin wool in another farmhouse. One day the “lamiak” (half women-half duck mythological figure) who lived in the cave told him not to come back near the cave. He didn’t take care and one day he was [attacked] and disappeared in the cave. It is also said that Askondo cave was a witches’ meeting place.

The Basque language is the oldest spoken language in Europe… This ancient heritage makes us proud and aware of the necessity to preserve it in this globalized world.

What will happen next with your work in the cave?

At the moment, we have only done a preliminary study of the paintings. It is necessary to perform a detailed inspection of all the walls in the 300 meters of cave and also to perform some digging tests to know if there is an occupation site contemporary to the paintings. Also a restoration program is planned for the worst-conserved paintings. All these studies will be the object of a monographic publication where all the results of the project will be detailed.

Comedian and actor Jack Black will be in Altadena today for a day-long fundraiser for a cancer patient who founded a chess non-profit that has served several local school districts.

The fundraiser is for Dave Melrose, a one time barista at a Old Pasadena coffee house, who moved to Carlsbad to found the San Diego Chess Academy non-profit, according to a website designed to raise money to treat Melrose's cancer.

The chess academy has served several local school districts, including Pasadena Unified School District, according to the site.

Tickets start at $30, and the event information can be found on the site, as well as a list of all the musicians, comedians, and spoken word artists who will be performing.

Melrose is well-known to the arts scene in Altadena, according to a Pasadena Weekly write-up of the event, and the fundraiser has also attracted attention from the Los Angeles Times. The Altadenablog has some more info about Melrose's life in an article here.

Friday, May 13, 2011

It's a little vague, but from what I could gather, it's another "pre-writing" "Moon and Venus" rock carving - this one found in Sudan that dates to "more than" 5000 years ago. I added the map of the Egypt/Sudan region to provide a general idea of the geography. The Nile River is, of course, the life-line through arid Egypt (the climate turned from savannah to desert about 7,000 years ago, or about 5,000 BCE, or even earlier).

Map of Egypt, Sudan, and surrounding areas, showing Nile River and tributaries

An archaeological team in the Bayuda Desert in northern Sudan has discovered dozens of new rock art drawings, some of which were etched more than 5,000 years ago and reveal scenes that scientists can't explain.
﻿

Image from article.

﻿The team discovered 15 new rock art sites in an arid valley known as Wadi Abu Dom, some 18 miles (29 kilometers) from the Nile River. It’s an arid valley that flows with water only during rainy periods. Many of the drawings were carved into the rock faces — no paint was used — of small stream beds known as "khors" that flow into the valley.

Some of the sites revealed just a single drawing while others have up to 30, said lead researcher Tim Karberg, of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in Germany.

Today I received the latest bulletin from the Wisconsin Scholastic Chess Federation.

I think scholastic chess is extremely important for several reasons, but the one attempt Goddesschess made to fund some prizes for a small local scholastic tournament was shot down in flames when we felt obligated to point out to the organizers (mostly people affiliated with a religious school) that part of our main website, Goddesschess, is the Las Vegas Show Girls with, er, pasties and double entendres galore :) Well, that put a nix on that. We tried, we had good intentions. But we're not going to change who we've been and who we are just because parents might potentially be uncomfortable that their children know more about the Las Vegas Show Girls than they do.

So, we keep our nose out of scholastic chess and hope that at least a few of the so-promising girls who play at the scholastic level will continue with chess after middle-school. Very few even make it that far and far fewer, still, to the K-12 level, which just really really sucks.

But despite my despair for any increase in female players in the United States coming through the ranks of domestic scholastic chess any time soon, there are glimmers of hope. There are some hot spots of scholastic chess development that I read about regularly: New York City, suburban Chicago, Lubbock, Texas. And there is this report about a pilot scholastic chess program at Clara Mohammed School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (my hometown!):

Elizabeth Shaughnessy founder of the Berkeley Chess School and chess educator of the year in 2011, gave an address at the annual ChessFest at the University of Texas at Dallas.In her address titled "The Importance of Chess in the American Community Today" she shares a graph that shows the improvement of 2nd grade studentswho were taught chess compared to those who were not taught chess over a three year period.Another graph she shared shows the difference in math scores of those students who received more than 20 hours of chess instruction per week vs. other students in the districts.The chess students had a 15.5 point gain in their CST math scores. A third document she shares is a chart showing the progression of student change as they learn chess in relation to their academic achievement.

WSCF has begun this work with one such school in Milwaukee.Students at Clara Mohammed School who were taught chess all year, according to school leaders, are beginning to show academic and behavior changes similar to those above. WSCF would like to continue this important work and to this end.

is currently writing grant applications to emulate programs like those in New York, California and Washington.

Yeah, controversial I know, because the Clara Mohammed School is Islam-based. It is also located in one of the oldest ghetto areas in the city of Milwaukee. If chess can help these kids, who need all the help they can get, Goddess help them, then I'm all for chess in schools.
The Wisconsin Scholastic Chess Foundation.

Hmmmm... Except for the top 5, who seem to have changed almost every round, what are the other players doing, mailing it in? Geez ladies. How about playing some CHESS?

Full standings (R7) - judge for yourself. Top rated female players are playing like crap. Is bad water to blame??? Boredom? Have the ladies finally decided to do a "show up but strike" in protest of the lousy prizes in comparison to the men's championship? Well, probably not - I shouldn't day dream...

Our Commitment to Chess

Scholarships for Chess Femmes

Our Commitment to Chess

2012 Goddesschess Canadian Women's Closed Chess Championship

2014 SPONSORSHIPS

Hales Corners Chess Challenge XIXApril 12, 2014Milwaukee, WIPrizes for female players in Open and Reserve sections and paid entry to next HCCC for top female finisher in each section. This is Goddesschess' 12th HCCC!

Goddesschess Fighting Spirit Award

2013 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

2013 SPONSORSHIPS

Hales Corners Chess Challenge XVIIIOctober 12, 2013Milwaukee, WIRecord prize money awarded to chess femmes - $800!In honor of National Chess Day and the one year anniversary of the passing of our webmaster, researcher and writer, Don McLean, additional prizes of $150 were awarded to the top two male finishers in each Section.Milwaukee Summer Challenge IIJune 15 - 16, 2013Milwaukee, WIPrizes for the chess femmes and funding a best game prize

Search This Blog

"Advanced Chess" Leon 2002

About Me

I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...